Setlist Insider: Melvins

Ever-touring Washington rockers Melvins are a month away from their 43-date fall tour, and they've already played 60+ shows this year. We were happy to have them in our Setlist.fm studio last time they were in LA - they shared some tour tales and Buzz had some hot takes on encores and perfect set lengths. Watch them get into it:

#1 most-performed song:

Steve: "'The Bit' is the highest numbered song played."
Dale: "506 times."
Buzz: "'The Bit' is really easy to play is why we play it."
Dale: "It's the easiest because I wrote it."
Buzz: "It's a good song. It's fun to play live."
Dale: "Mastodon played it 75 times."

New Orleans, an oasis:

Buzz: "In 1986, we played New Orleans, we played in a place called Jed's. Everybody there was too drunk to have any idea what we played. New Orleans was an oasis for us and always has been, especially then, when we did a whole US tour where everybody hated our band, brutally."
Dale: "But had we played The Gumbo Place in Baton Rouge, it would have been a different story. They would have loved us there."

The post-Atlantic comeback:

Buzz: What year did we do the most shows? ‘97 was the most?
Steve: "Yeah, 123."
Buzz: "That was right when we got dropped from Atlantic Records and we immediately went on tour the second we were dropped with a new album that wasn't on Atlantic. What most bands do when they're on a major label and they get dropped, they just flounder. "Oh, what are we gonna do now? We didn't make it." Well, we never really thought we were going to make it. We thought Atlantic Records would do one record and then they would move on. We ended up doing three albums with them. Fourth album was not gonna happen, I just knew it, and so I didn't want us to make it look like, "Well, we had our shot and that was it." We were gonna make sure that that wasn't the case, and that's the whole reason we did it."

The perfect set length:

Buzz: "No rock band is good for three hours. If I could see a band play a good, solid 30 minute set, I'm good. Nothing except "Lawrence of Arabia" is good for three hours. That's it."

Dale: "Thanks for watching. We're The Melvins. If you have any information on our past set lists, shows that we've done, songs that we've played-"
Buzz: "Or are trying to make it more accurate."
Dale: "Go to setlist.fm and-"
Steve: "Set the record straight."
Catch Melvins on tour this fall, beginning September 5 in San Francisco. Check out the full list of dates here.
Karma Police - Please Share:

Most played songs

Last updated: 14 Feb 2025, 23:05 UTC

More from this Artist


4,588 users have been to shows of this artist.